1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a technique in which by a recognition process targeted for an image of a character string which is created by a camera, a drawing process, etc., character candidates for each of characters forming the character string are derived together with their reliabilities, according to which a word corresponding to the character string is recognized.
2. Related Art
In a general character recognition process, after an image of a recognition target character string is binarized, areas where individual characters are present are individually cut out from the binarized image. Then, an image in each area is checked against model images registered for the respective types of characters, and a character corresponding to a model image that is used when the highest similarity is obtained is identified as a character corresponding to a character in the image.
Note, however, that since erroneous recognition may occur, depending on the state of a processing target image, recognition processing methods taking into account the above are proposed. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 5-46814 describes that a dictionary is searched using a character string generated by recognized characters and if the same character string as the search target character string is found in the dictionary, then a recognition result is determined to be correct and thus the character string is determined; on the other hand, if the same character string as the search target character string is not found, then a character recognition process is performed again.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2006-163830 describes, for example, that after a plurality of combinations of recognition candidate characters and recognition reliabilities are created for each of characters included in character recognition target data, word candidates are generated by combining recognition candidate characters in a plurality of ways, a word dictionary is searched using the word candidates in decreasing order of priority to narrow down information (dictionary words) included in the word dictionary, and a dictionary word whose similarity to a word candidate is highest is selected from the narrowed-down dictionary words.